NON ANGELI SED ANGLI.
I wish that the Rokeby Velasquez now firmly secured for the British nation could have been allowed to remain in Bond Street for a short while; not to tantalise the foreign countries who so eagerly competed for its acquisition, nor to emphasise the patriotism of its former owners, but as a contrast to ‘Some Examples of the Independent Art of To-day,’ held at Messrs. Agnew’s. Perhaps not as a contrast even, but as a complement. I do not mean to place all the examples on the same level with the ‘Venus,’ though with some I should have preferred to live; yet the juxtaposition would have asserted the tradition of the younger painters and the modernity of the older master. ‘We are all going to—Agnew’s, and Velasquez will be of the company,’ or something like Gainsborough’s dying words would have occurred sooner or later. I am persuaded that we look at the ancient pictures with frosted magnifying-glasses,
and stare at the younger men from the wrong end of the binoculars. It was ever thus; it always will be so. Most of us suspect our contemporaries or juniors. And they—les jeunes féroces—are impatient of their immediate predecessors. Nos pères out toujours tort. Though grandpapa is sometimes quite picturesque; his waistcoat and old buttons suit us very well. ‘Your Raphael is not even divine,’ said Velasquez when he left Rome and that wonderful p.p.c. card on the Doria. ‘Your Academicians are not even academic,’ some of the younger painters and their champions are saying to-day.
I found, moreover, the epithet ‘independent,’ to qualify an entertaining and significant exhibition, misleading. For many of the items could only be so classified in the sense that they were independent of Messrs. Agnew and the Royal Academy. Mr. Tonks and Professor Brown are official instructors at the Slade School in London; Mr. C. J. Holmes is Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery. Mr. Gerard Chowne was a professor at Liverpool. Mr. Fry is now an official at New York; and the majority of the painters belonged to two
distinctive and dependent groups—the Glasgow School and the New English Art Club. Intense individualism is not incompatible with militant collectivism. The only independent artists, if you except Mr. Nicholson, were Mr. C. H. Shannon and Mr. Charles Ricketts, who have always stood apart, being neither for the Royal Academy nor its enemies; their choice is in their pictures.
I feel it difficult to write of painters for some of whom I acted showman so long at the Carfax Gallery. I confess that when I heard they were going to Bond Street my pangs were akin to those of the owner of a small country circus on learning that his troupe of performing dogs had been engaged by Mr. Imre Kiralfy or the Hippodrome. A quondam dealer in ultramontanes, I became an Othello of the trade. And in their grander quarters (I grieve to say) they looked better than ever, though I would have chosen another background, something less expensive and more severe. Yes, they all went through their hoops gracefully. With one exception, I never saw finer Wilson Steers; the ‘Sunset’ might well be hung beside the new Turners, when
the gulf between ancient and modern art would be almost imperceptible. The ‘Aliens’ of Mr. Rothenstein in the cosmopolitan society of a public picture gallery would hardly appear foreigners, because they belong to a country where the inhabitants are racy of every one else’s soil. When time has given an added dignity (if that were possible) to this work, I can realise how our descendants will laugh at our lachrymose observations on the decadence of art. The background against which the stately Hebrew figures are silhouetted is in itself a liberal education for the aged and those who ask their friends what these modern fellows mean.
When the inhabitants of the unceltiferous portion of these islands employ the adjective un-English you may be sure there is something serious on the carpet. It is valedictory, expressive of sorrow and contempt rather than anger. All the other old favourites of vituperative must have missed fire before this almost sacred, disqualifying Podsnappianism is applied to the objectionable person, picture, book, behaviour, or movement. And when the epithet is brought into action, in nine cases
out of ten it is aimed at some characteristic essentially, often blatantly, Anglo-Saxon. Throughout the nineteenth century all exponents of art and literature not conforming to Fleet Street ideals were voted un-English; Byron, Shelley, Keats, Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelites, and, in course of good time, those artists who formed the New English Art Club. There was some ground for suspicion of foreign intrigue. They regarded Mr. Whistler, an American, who flirted with French impressionism, as a pioneer. Some of their names suggest the magic Orient or the romantic scenery of the Rhine. But it is not extravagant to assert that if Mr. Rothenstein had chosen to be born in France or Germany, instead of in Bradford, his art would have come to us in another form. In his strength and his weakness he is more English than the English. Art may have cosmopolitan relations (it is usually a hybrid), but it must take on the features of the country and people where it grows; or it may change them, or change the vision of the people of its adoption. Yet Ruth must not look too foreign in the alien corn, or her values will get wrong.
When an English artist airs his foreign accent and his smattering of French pigment his work has no permanent significance. Even Professor Legros unconsciously assimilated British subjectivity: his Latin rein has been slackened; his experiments are often literary.